


My Life by James Abraham McKinney

by Harbinger97



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: American Civil War, Death, Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, Memoirs, Mexican American War, Undeath, Vampires, Violence, the embrace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-08-06 00:10:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16377707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harbinger97/pseuds/Harbinger97
Summary: The story of one man's quest to discover solace and forgiveness for a life, (and death), full of violence and war. James McKinney begins life as a nineteenth century farmer's son, but quickly finds his calling as a United States cavalry officer in the Mexican American War. This is only the beginning of his slide into the dark and blood soaked madness of the world behind the world, the true world... The World of Darkness. Read the story of how James lost his humanity, and then his desperate fight to get it back through centuries of war.





	1. Mortality

**Author's Note:**

> (This is the backstory to one of my recent VtM characters who has become a bit of a force of nature within my DM's world after our campaign... my fellow players and DM enjoyed it, so I figured y'all would too. I'll update as it gets written, but as a college student trying to keep a 3.5+ GPA I can get pretty busy...)

My Life- James Abraham McKinney

"I've been a lot of things in my life... a son, a husband, a father.... a soldier, a bandit, and even a lawman... but I think I've finally come to terms with what I really am. My name is James Abraham McKinney, and I'm a killer."

The first time I was born it was July of 1830, in a holler up Johnson County way in the Kentucky Commonwealth. The family home was made of split logs, and we never had a whole lot in the way of luxuries, but we loved each other and that was enough in the hard times. 

At 16, I struck out for Virginia with my older brother to attempt to make our fortunes. We ended up in Alexandria and caught up in the recruitment for the little spat with the Mexicans. Being wide-eyed kids and having not reached the relative wisdom of a man's 20's, we signed with a bonus of $5 on signing and a salary of $7 a month. It wasn't much, but it was better than kicking around looking for factory work. To tell you the truth, I was more than compensated by the idea of helping the good folks of Texas fight against tyranny and to go on a grand Western adventure... I may've been a bit idealistic, but given my current predicament it ain't particularly out of character.

As newly minted privates in Alexandria's own Company B of the First Virginian Regiment, we shipped out of the port on a steamer to Aquia Creek, then took a train to Richmond, and finally boarded the Victory to Mexico. Let me tell you, being on a ship for the first time in your life after getting blackout drunk for your first time is a hell of an experience. I swear I didn't contemplate oceanic travel for another 70 some years, and by that point I was dead already, so the sea sickness sort of faded. Anyway, I spent two years of my life fighting and losing friends in Mexico and learning to hate that damned Santa Anna and the sound of cannon fire. I came to find out later that while I had slowly become a cavalryman during the war, General Lee had been serving as an aide de camp in the march to Mexico City. I think I may've met him once or twice on my down time, but I couldn't swear to it all these years later.

It was 1848 before I saw Virginia again, and by that time the change from farming to industry was stark. I'd ended up a Corporal and been loaned to a cavalry scouting unit because of my fair gun hand and good eyes, not to mention a fair bit of riding experience, and I stepped off the boat in Alexandria with my Colt Walker on my hip and proud as hell of my new rank. Virgil had decided to stay in California and start a ranch, but I wanted to see Momma and Pop, so I'd said my goodbyes to him and his wife before coming back home. I visited Kentucky once or twice, and even thought about moving, but there was too much excitement in Alexandria to move back to the hollers…

It was 13 years before God trained my hands to war again, this time against my own countrymen. I had found a family in Virginia by that time and had put down roots in Fairfax County rather than staying in the now bustling City of Alexandria., so I was not aware that I was no longer an American citizen until the day after we declared secession. 

I had deliberately stayed out of politics up until the war was inevitable, as I was somewhat moderate in comparison to my countrymen. I owned no slaves, and while I wouldn’t call a colored man friend until much later in my unnatural life, I had no serious compunctions about freedmen. In 2018 this probably seems a bit conservative, but in Virginia’s high society and learned spheres I was considered fairly radical. Not wanting to add a rod to my own back, I kept this political peculiarity to myself. I needed no more problems than my young wife, my farm, or my two children could offer… But sadly, my plowshare was once again needed as a blade.

I was asked to return to the Virginian cavalry in May of 1861 with a commission as a ranger captain, a new concept for proper Virginian military men, and was assigned to a standby near Manassas for what Yankees now call The First Battle of Bull Run, and what we just called the Battle of Manassas because we didn’t need asinine creative names for a military disaster. 

My men and I fought there, if you could call killing idiot boys and poorly trained city slickers fighting, under one General P.G.T. Beauregard… A human testament to why war college shouldn’t be wasted on the terminally overambitious. Only reason it didn’t go to hell in a handbasket was old Stonewall, and even then it was a pretty sad excuse for a battle. It may’ve been a victory, but it was phyric in the extreme.

I won’t bore you with a history lesson, so it will suffice to say that I fought and slogged through nearly five years of bloody battles before my turning, which is much more relevant to my current circumstances than any old skirmish… well, except for the skirmish that lead to my death. 

It was January in Alabama, near a town called Athens, and we were being lead by Moses Hannon, a recent acquaintance of mine at the time. We’d been attached to an Alabaman unit to replace harsh casualties and tasked to raid a small fort in town with what was supposed to be a very small garrison. What they didn’t tell us was that it was being lead by a damned vampire, and specifically one of the bloodiest bastards I’ve ever had the pleasure of killing. 

We charged the garrison before they could close the gates, coming out of the trees with LeMats blazing fire into the cool night air, but before we could decimate even half of the 100 troops stationed there, they began to get up, in ones and twos, from the windrows of dead men. The first to be forcibly dismounted was Captain Hannon, and I was sprayed by his blood when the ghoulish blue bellied monsters ripped him apart, but I was quickly overwhelmed myself. I discharged all 7 shots from my massive cavalry pistol, felling only two of the creatures despite my surety that all my shots had found their marks, so I unloaded the shotgun into the skull of a reaching abomination before drawing my saber and being dragged to the ground. I gave a valiant fight, getting another two of the things with well placed swipes of the blade, but I was now bleeding from wounds all over my body and growing weaker in my attack. I stood surrounded by pale and hungry corpses, with the screaming of men and horses loud in my ears all around, so I became determined to sell my life dearly in the face of hell itself… Until He walked out of the command tent. 

I do not talk about my sire often, and I have frequently attempted to suppress my memories of my embrace, but I will tell it this once, in case it helps some other poor soul in a position of ignorance. 

Captain Emil Adams, which is what I will call the bastard since I was never enlightened as to his birth name, was a tall and gaunt creature. His issue greatcoat hung only to his haunches, and stretched across his broad back, making him seem to loom out of the shadows, even in the dim light of the crescent moon that hung over the fort. His hat hung low over his face but his eyes were unobscured by the shadows, no matter how much I wish they had been. The eyes are what I remember most from that first meeting, yellow and light reflecting, like jaundiced hellfire in the depths of his cruel face. 

Emil stalked onto the killing field like a bird of prey, taking in my desperate plight and that of the men still left behind me in one unpitying glance. His hands shot out like a musical conductor in rigor mortis, and suddenly the beasts all around me froze in mid-battle, even the one currently pinned by my blade. None moved a muscle, almost as if they’d been carved out of stone. I yanked the sword from the thing’s chest, hearing steel rasp against bone, and stood ready to face this new threat.

As my sword point cleared flesh, Emil pinned me with his rancid gaze like a bug in a collection box. I lost all control of my body and found myself just as still as the man I had pulled my blade from, the only things still in motion my eyes. I raged against this horrible fate, but I could only scream inwardly as what seemed to me the personification of Death’s Grim Reaper strode across the dark, frost flecked field. 

In a few long, graceful strides, he had reached the maimed thing before me, and he wrung its neck as if he were harvesting a bird. The felled thing dropped bonelessly to the turf, and suddenly Emil was once again focused on me, eyes seeming to bore into my very soul. His words haunt me to this very day.

“The weak should fear the strong,” he whispered, cradling my head in foot-long claws. “You have shown strength, but you are still only cattle.”

His claws drew a line under my eye and I could feel cold fire and warm blood blossom across my cheek. I watched him lap the red stains from his hand in an almost reverent fashion, as if he were receiving holy communion. I was struck immediately by the grotesque and profane nature of the act, and were I in control of my faculties, I am sure that I would have shaken uncontrollably.

“I will give you a chance to know what it is to have true strength, but you must earn it. Only blood and terror, only pain unimaginable can bring us to the height of glory. Today, you follow the Allfather in the path of knowledge… I envy you your suffering.”

Then the asshole snapped my neck.


	2. The Embrace/Homecoming

I woke up amidst struggling meat. In life, the bodies around me had been my friends and comrades in arms… In death, they were only food for The Beast. I remember everything in clear detail, the weeping and screaming of grown men as I tore into their jugulars with my teeth, the agony of the change after I finished off the last of the living, and finally, the dawning revelation of what I had become, as a new dawn broke over the barn turned abattoir that had housed my second blasphemous birth. I passed out in the offal of my men and slept the first tormented night of the rest of my life.

The only thing that kept me from taking a nice stroll into the next sunrise was the note I found pinned to the barn door, using my still blood caked cavalry blade… It’s been something like 200 years, but the gist was something like this.

The chase begins. I know where your bitch is. Catch me if you can.

It was signed with a splatter of blood, which through some terrible instinct I knew to be my sire’s. The existential dread I had felt up until discovering the note vanished like morning fog under the heat of a blinding rage. I may have been dead, but no one threatens my family, not even that thing.

…

For the next few days I ran cross country, stopping only to avoid the sun in caves and hollows, feeding only when absolutely necessary from wild animals and the occasional unlucky traveler. I had one burning thought for the 2 weeks it took me to make the Virginian border… I was going to kill that man. I was going to sink my thumbs into those cursed eyes and and tear his head clean off, feast on his ichor, and become death incarnate to any son of a bitch that would threaten my family. Looking back at it now, I was just a bit incoherent and more than a tad sociopathic at the time, but you try having a supernatural beast melded to your soul and having to run a cross country race to keep your loved ones from a fate worse than death. It ain’t exactly a cake walk on the best of days.

By the time I crossed the Fairfax County line, I knew I was too late. The electric thrum of my sire’s presence nearly made the air alive with power, making my instincts go absolutely haywire. I fought the urge to either submit or flee as I made my way down the all too familiar dirt roads towards my little farm. Were my heart still beating, it would have nearly burst through my chest at my property line as I was driven to my knees by an overwhelming urge to bow my head in supplication.

It was there, in the dust of the roadbed and in sight of my family home, that I watched my wife and children die.

Emil walked out the door of my house holding my wife by the neck. My now predatory vision could pick out a stream of blood beginning to darken her light blouse as he dragged her screaming over the threshold, but no matter how hard I struggled I could only watch as his tongue lapped the nearly black looking fluid from her neck and breasts. I screamed in terror, frustration and despair as tears fell freely from my eyes. The sound of breaking vertebrae made my eyes flinch shut, and I began to let out a howl so terrible that I have only hear its like one other time in my long life.

I heard him dragging her. The sound of her limp body being pulled down the porch steps like a sack of particularly heavy laundry still haunts my nightmares, and I would not open my eyes until I heard the organic thump of her hitting the ground in front of me.

“You are late.”

The words took a moment to register as language to me. I looked into his awful smile and I roared at him even more incoherently, my rage long past the ability to be expressed in words alone. His smile grew wider as he tutted at me as if I were a particularly slow child.

“Now, now, little kindred. It is not I that is at fault for the loss of this filthy mortal broodmare… the cause of her death lies squarely on your shoulders. If you had not been weak, had been more worthy of the life I have given you, your bitch would still be living, though I doubt you would have much use for her then. She tastes like dirt, much like the rest of these poor idiot Southerners, spending their fleeting mortal existences scratching in filth rather than feeling the thrill of battle or the true thrill of domination. Even those of you who understand the true nature of the world, that greater races are meant to prey on and subjugate their lessers, are soft and weak in comparison to my ancestors. I long to be rid of this upstart country.”

He nudged my wife’s body towards me with his polished riding boot, as if she were some disease ridden vermin and not the only woman I had ever loved. I lacked the strength to even roar at him again and could only weep silently in response.

“Feed. Prove to me you are worthy of my gifts, that you can leave behind your weak Christian morality and your worthless mortal emotions behind.”

I uttered a plea to God himself, a silent prayer that I would wake up from this nightmare or at the very least regain the use of my body, but it seemed that even my desperate thoughts were not private to this monster. He snarled in rage as he looked down at me and turned to stalk back inside the house, leaving me kneeling alone as he lifted the oil lamp hooked by the door and peered inside.

Emil’s face twisted into one of his sick smiles one more time as he called into the house, turning to hold my gaze.

“Come children,” he breathed, his voice now silken as a spider’s web. “Call to your father and tell him how glad you are to see him.”

From the door to the house came the voices of my daughter and young son, calling to me as if they hadn’t even noticed the death of their mother just outside. As they cheerfully called for me to come inside, Emil smashed the lamp in the threshold, setting the floor inside the doorway alight but not at all disturbing the happy exclamations of my children. Their last words were that they loved their daddy…

My God in heaven… they didn’t even know they were burning alive…

Those words haunt my nightmares more than anything I have ever done or seen in this dark and demented existence..

He laughed then, as if my pain caused him joy without measure. He was nearly giggling as my little girl tottered from the door of the house, her face blackened and molten and hair ablaze… Looking back on it now I realize she lived longer because she wasn’t inhaling the fumes of her own skin. I don’t know if Emil intended that bit, but I sure as hell would raise him from whatever part of Perdition in which he currently resides just to burn him alive so that he can feel what my Alice did… My God, even now I would revel in causing that monster pain that mortal men can only imagine.

It was then, by some miracle, that my prayers were answered in the waning light of the funeral pyre of my mortal life… I could stand.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun Facts
> 
> 1.Our Living Language- One feature of Upper Southern English and specifically of Appalachian English is its pronunciation of the final unstressed syllable in words such as hollow, window, and potato as (ər). Holler, winder, and tater are merely variant pronunciations reflected in spelling. As a noun, holler has the specific meaning in the Appalachians of "a small valley between mountains": They live up in the holler underneath Big Bald Mountain. (Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014)
> 
> 2\. In the 1840's, Alexandria was becoming one of the biggest trade and manufacturing cities in the American South
> 
> 3\. The five dollar signing bonus that James and his brother receive would translate to approximately one hundred and forty five dollars in today's currency.
> 
> 4\. The Battle of Bull Run really was a clusterf**k, both sides had very little experience fighting pitched battles and only a series of coincidences, (plus some guts on the part of Stonewall Jackson), made it turn in favor of the Confederates.
> 
> 5\. The battle at Athens that I describe did, in the loosest of terms, occur... but it was really just a footnote in history until I added the blood crazed viking posing as a Union commander. I think it's way more interesting that way, but that might just be me.
> 
> 6\. If you're wondering where James got the shotgun during his forced dismount, let me elaborate a bit... The LeMat Grapeshot Revolver was a .42 or .36 caliber, nine round capacity, cap and ball revolver with a very interesting addition for the sort of close quarters fighting that occasionally befell cavalry troopers caught in a knot of infantry, a 20 gauge smoothbore shotgun barrel slung under the .42 pistol barrel. Approximately 900 of these wicked looking sidearms were delivered to the CSA by way of Birmingham, England.


End file.
